A Work Place, a Sacred Space
by Steve McGill
“Invest yourself in everything you do. There’s fun in being serious.”
–John Coltrane
A couple weeks ago I was out on the track coaching one of my hurdlers whom I coach privately. This kid is a good athlete with a good work ethic and a genuine eagerness to improve, but he’s goofy as hell. For me, the track is, first and foremost, a work place. I like for athletes to arrive at the track on time, to go right into their warmup, and to stay focused on the task at hand throughout the training session. I like to keep the atmosphere lighthearted, so there is plenty of room for casual banter and some joking around, but the reason we’re here is to take care of business, so that the athlete gets better, so that the athlete leaves the track a better hurdler than upon entering it.
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But this particular athlete on this particular day was reminding me of why I had escaped coaching for a school team in the first place. During my many years coaching for school teams and club teams, it used to drive me crazy dealing with distracted athletes who had a billion things on their minds other than the actual practice session. It got me thinking that the most obvious quality distinguishing the athletes who excel and continually improve from those who stagnate is not just work ethic in and of itself, but focus, which comes from a genuine enjoyment of working hard. As the saying goes, if you love your work, it doesn’t feel like work. Athletes who lack such focus, whose motivations are solely exterior, or who lack motivation to begin with, will often waste reps in practice. For me, there’s nothing more annoying and aggravating than a wasted rep.
How do I define a wasted rep? It’s a rep in which the athlete made the same mistake as the previous rep because the athlete wasn’t focusing on a specific cue. It’s a rep in which the athlete’s mind is distracted. A mistake in and of itself doesn’t constitute a wasted rep. A bad rep isn’t necessarily a wasted rep. If I tell the athlete to exaggerate the knee lift of the lead leg, and it takes the athlete four reps to actually do it, that means we wasted three reps. Usually, those three reps were wasted not because the athlete wasn’t trying, but because the athlete wasn’t listening, or didn’t really understand the instruction given but didn’t say so. So it took us four reps to get where we should’ve gotten to in one rep. Which means the legs will get tired sooner and we won’t be able to make as much as progress in this session as we otherwise could have.
So when I’m working with an athlete who is new to me, who has a background of practicing in atmospheres where nonchalance is acceptable, I’ll let that athlete know early on, we want quality sessions. Don’t waste my time. When the athletes understand and embrace the concept that the work itself is fun, that’s when bonds form — coach/athlete bonds, as well as bonds between teammates. When you have athletes who have an energetic attitude and who approach their craft in a serious manner, magic happens. And it happens every day, at some point during every session. Not just in races. That’s why I love coaching Falon Spearman, the high school senior who has appeared in many of my YouTube videos recently. A couple weeks ago, she expressed to me dissatisfaction with her trail leg, and I suggested the idea of doing some drills over 36-inch hurdles. We tried it out, and it has really been helping. With Falon, the ideas are endless, the possibilities are limitless, because she doesn’t waste reps and she has an innate joy and curiosity when it comes to hurdling.
When the track is acknowledged as a work place by coach and athletes alike, that common mindset expands everyone’s creativity. And the creative freedom transforms the work place into a sacred space. It is sacred because this track has become the place where the journey has taken place. It is the place where lifelong bonds have formed. It is the place where one feels a sense of home, a sense of belonging, in a world that can be wildly unpredictable and sometimes quite hostile.
People who know me assume that my greatest days as a coach were when I was coaching Keni Harrison, or when I was coaching Johnny Dutch and Booker Nunley and Wayne Davis all at the same time. In a lot of ways, those were the glory days for sure. But the closest group I had was my group of hurdlers on my school team back in 2003, when I had five male hurdlers, two of whom only ran the 110’s, one of whom only ran the 300’s, two of whom ran both, and all of whom were all-in. None of these guys were on the level of a Dutch, Nunley, or Davis talent-wise, but they were just as much fun to coach.
One day during the 2003 season, I was relaxing on the track with my hurdle crew: DJ, Joe Coe, Ray Ray, Jake, and Alex. They had just completed a hard workout I had given them, and now, after a cool-down lap and some stretching, they were sitting in a semi-circle, hands wrapped around their knees, laughing and joking, enjoying the afterglow that comes as a reward after a demanding training session.
“We gonna practice this weekend, Coach?” DJ asked. It was a Friday. Usually I’d meet with this particular group on one day of the weekend for a hurdle workout, as the weekends allowed us more track space than we were afforded on weekdays, when the whole team — sprinters, distance runners, etc. — was out there running.
“Can’t tomorrow,” I said. “Would like to get a workout in on Sunday though. Sunday morning would be best ‘cause it’s gonna be hot later in the day.”
“Don’t know if I can make it, Coach,” DJ said. “My family goes to church Sunday mornings.”
I looked up at the blue sky above us, down the row of empty lanes in front of us, at the birds pecking for worms in the infield, and at the hurdle right next to me that Joe had been using to stretch his hamstrings. “This is church,” I said.
I said it half-jokingly, but I really wasn’t joking at all. This relationship, this marriage, between myself and the hurdles, started a long time ago: in my junior year of high school, when I quit the basketball team so I could run the hurdles full-time. Back then, I felt like the hurdles had saved me: from the tyranny of the chronically angry basketball coaches and the misogynistic locker room banter of my teammates. The relationship continued my senior year, when the desire to hurdle again was my only motivation for wanting to live while hospitalized with aplastic anemia, a potentially fatal blood disease. It continued ten years later, when, while deciding what my next move should be upon finishing grad school, I heard a calm, quiet voice in my head say, “Go where the hurdles take you.” They took me to where I was sitting that very moment: with DJ and the rest of the squad.
I didn’t intend to offend DJ, and no offense was taken. DJ understood my obsession, and, even though he was the least naturally-gifted of the crew, he shared it more than any of the others. Earlier that season he had tripped over a rock and sprained his ankle while doing some uphill sprints on a trail in the nearby woods. He had been expected to miss a month, but ended up coming back within ten days. He loved hurdling that much. So when I said “this is church,” he just laughed and said, “Gotcha Coach.”
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